Readers have observed
duplicity in
the rhetoric of Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron" (1886). On
the one
hand the story realizes a number of the conventions of
realistic narrative,
yet on the other hand there are several violations of these
conventions,
especially at the level of narrative voice. The violations
consist of odd
shifts between past and present tense, apostrophes to objects
in the story,
and direct addresses by the narrator to the reader and to
Sylvia, the main
character. Narrative activities such as these tend to be seen
as violations
of the rhetoric of realistic fiction for at least two
interesting reasons.
First, they are most commonly found during the nineteenth
century in the
sentimental fiction of "women's" magazines. For example, they
occur frequently
in Jewett's early magazine fiction that appears in The
Uncollected Short
Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. In such locations, these
rhetorical devices
nearly always contribute to a moralizing tone, when "good"
values or sentiments
are enjoined upon the reader or a character. Second, as Wayne
Booth illustrates
in Part 1 of A Rhetoric of Fiction, such techniques
were increasingly
suspect among Jewett's realist contemporaries because they
seemed to subvert
what was becoming the central "rule" of realistic narrative,
that the narrator
who is not a character should seem invisible: "The novelist
must not, by
taking sides, exhibit his preferences. . . . He has . . . to
render and
not to tell. . . ." (Ford Madox Ford, in Booth 25).

It is worth observing that
Jewett gradually
abandoned using tense shifts, direct addresses, and
apostrophes, so that
they appear rarely in the fiction she collected into books. "A
White Heron"
is virtually the lone exception among her better known works,
and it remains
her single best known and most popular piece of fiction. These
two observations
would tend to suggest that her choice to use techniques here
that she had
generally abandoned by the time she wrote this story was in
some way a
right choice. This story has held its own in a literary
climate that has
not, on the whole, been favorable to Jewett's works.

The apparent duplicity of
Jewett's
rhetoric in "A White Heron" has contributed to critical
ambivalence about
the story. We can see such a response in Jewett's difficulties
finding
a magazine publisher for what is now her most famous story.
William Dean
Howells, who published a number of Jewett's stories, rejected
this one
because it was too romantic (Griffith 22). In response to this
rejection,
Jewett wrote to her friend Annie Fields: "Mr. Howells thinks
that this
age frowns upon the romantic, that it is no use to write
romance any more;
but dear me, how much of it there is left in every-day life
after all.
It must be the fault of the writers that such writing is dull,
but what
shall I do with my 'White Heron' now she is written? She isn't
a very good
magazine story, but I love her, and I mean to keep her for the
beginning
of my next book. . . ." (Held, in Nagel 58).

The early reviewers
responded at least
indirectly to this duplicity. They tended, even in praising
the story,
to belittle it with qualifications. For example, the reviewer
for Overland
Monthly said the story "is perfect in its way--a tiny
classic. One
little episode of a child life, among birds and woods, makes
it up; and
the secret soul of a child, the appeal of the bird to its
instinctive honor
and tenderness, never were interpreted with more beauty and
insight" (in
Nagel 34). While this is high praise, the author cannot resist
using qualifiers--"in
its way, tiny classic, little episode"--and referring to
Sylvia as an "it."
This language, especially neutering Sylvia, contrasts starkly
with Jewett's
personifying the story itself as female in her letter.

The doubleness of Jewett's
rhetoric
has earned negative criticism from recent critics, such as
Richard Cary
(101-2) and Josephine Donovan (70-71), and excuses about
Jewett's lack
of control from readers such as George Held (in Nagel 58-60).
Even the
most interesting among the defenders of Jewett's rhetoric,
Elizabeth Ammons,
finds herself caught in its doubleness. However, turning to
Ammons's reading
of the story opens a rich perspective from which to consider
what Jewett
may have accomplished with her double rhetoric.

Ammons does not set out to
defend Jewett's
narrative technique, but she finds herself doing so when she
explains the
strange last paragraph in which the narrator says a number of
puzzling
things that seem not to connect very well with the rest of the
story. Nine-year-old
Sylvia has found and communed with the white heron that her
visiting ornithologist
so desires to add to his collection of stuffed specimens, but
she has refused,
despite strong temptation, to tell him where he can find the
bird. Jewett's
narrator ends the story with exclamations and apostrophes:

Dear loyalty, that suffered a sharp
pang as the
guest went away disappointed later in the day, that could have
served and
followed him and loved him as a dog loves! Many a night Sylvia
heard the
echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home
with the
loitering cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report
of his gun
and the piteous sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent
to the ground,
their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet
with blood.
Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have
been,--who can
tell? Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and
summertime, remember!
Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this
lonely country
child! (239)

The narrator pities Sylvia's sharp pang when the
disappointed
hunter leaves never to return. She explains that after this day,
Sylvia
forgot his killing birds and, instead, missed him and dreamed of
his return.
The narrator asks a startling question when she wonders which is
the better
friend, after reminding the reader of Sylvia's now forgotten
horror at
the dead birds, for the story seems to have been saying all
along, "Of
course the birds were better friends!" But the narrator goes on
to concede
that Sylvia has lost "treasures" by being more loyal to the bird
than to
the man, and so admonishes woodlands and summer to compensate
Sylvia for
what she has given up. In this final passage, Jewett seems to
complicate
matters that we might have thought simple and settled after we
see Sylvia
refuse to betray the heron to the hunter.

Ammons's position is that
this paragraph
illustrates Jewett's resistance to masculine impositions:
"Having perfectly
reproduced traditional male-defined narrative structure she
writes against
it in her ultrafeminine last paragraph, full of flowery,
personal invocations
and hovering apostrophes. This flossy feminine paragraph rips
the fiction
formally very much as Sylvia's contrasting rhetoric--her
complete silence--has
already torn up the hunter's plot" (Ammons, "White Heron" 16).
Ammons's
language seems curiously violent and ambivalent, and also
rather exaggerated
here. It does not appear that she really approves of this
"flossy feminine"
paragraph that rips and tears. Furthermore, this paragraph
"sticks out"
in the story much less prominently than Ammons seems to imply,
for Jewett
has introduced unrealistic rhetoric earlier in the story. When
Sylvia climbs
the pine tree and communes with the heron, the narrative
rhetoric completely
does away with several major conventions of realistic
narration. Before
examining Jewett's narrative rhetoric in more detail, it will
be helpful
to place the story as a whole within the rich and enlightening
context
that Ammons provides.

Ammons characterizes a
masculine plot
as the traditional linear form including in this order:
exposition, conflict,
complication, crisis, climax, resolution. What does Ammons
mean when she
labels such a plot as masculine? This is the most common plot
form in fiction
because writing, publishing, and reviewing fiction have been
dominated
by a patriarchal ideology which favors plots that reflect
conventional
masculine gender roles. Traditionally, industrial man's
function in life
has been to go outside the family into another world and to
struggle there
until he succeeds or fails at some enterprise. Novel plots
tend to imitate
this significant masculine motion. In another essay Ammons
contrasts this
sort of plot with what she sees as the feminine plot of The
Country
of the Pointed Firs. That novel she sees as structured
outward from
a central location in space, time, and meaning, so that it
forms a web
of circular movements and social ties (Ammons, "Pointed Firs"
84-86).

In "A White Heron," says
Ammons, Jewett
did a perfect imitation of a masculine plot in representing
Sylvia's quest
for the heron. Furthermore, this plot appears in the context
of a fairy
tale of feminine coming of age, but with a difference. In most
such tales,
the young woman is rescued from the clutches of an evil, older
woman by
a handsome, young man. Ammons says the meaning of this plot is
that when
a girl reaches puberty, she is supposed to give up her
attachments to her
mother and girl-friends for heterosexual love (Ammons, "White
Heron" 10-14).
In Jewett's version, the rescue fails because the young woman
can have
a better life by staying longer with older women, both her
grandmother
and Mother Nature. So, while following a traditional,
masculine plot line,
Jewett subverts the traditional events of one version of that
plot. The
final paragraph of the story is part of Jewett's
subversion--with a feminine
flourish--of the male plot. That plot should end when Sylvia
rejects the
hunter in favor of the heron, but Jewett extends it with her
"flossy feminine"
intrusions.

I think that Ammons is
probably right
to argue that in this story Jewett works against some
patriarchal plots
and ideas. We see a resistance of this kind in Jewett's
comments on Howells's
rejection of the story for his magazine. What he thinks is
"real" in every-day
life is not "really" all there is to see there. Jewett insists
that "romance"
is also "real." A detailed examination of Jewett's style would
show that
her rhetoric in this story works continuously against the
masculine structure
with which she organizes the events. Several critical essays
that examine
language and style in the story vividly demonstrate how much
"fantasy"
the story contains: rational cows, thinking pine trees, and a
child who
reads animals' minds (see especially Smith, in Nagel).
Furthermore, the
quest plot is elaborately framed with a long introduction that
sets up
multileveled oppositions between the two paths open for
Sylvia's immediate
future. The strange final paragraph extends and closes the
frame. About
half the story's length is given to narrating Sylvia's quest,
though rhetorical
heightening may make this proportion seem greater.

Ammons, then, finds
doubleness in "A
White Heron." Jewett subverts a masculine plot by changing the
way it ends
and, also, with feminine rhetoric. I could not agree more,
except that
I believe Ammons misunderstands or underestimates the extent
and force
of that rhetoric. Let us then turn to a close examination of
the development
of Jewett's unrealistic rhetoric in "A White Heron."

From the very
beginning of the
story, as Jewett's readers have pointed out, there are
elements of the
fanciful and of fantasy that form an undercurrent counter to
realistic
narrative. In the opening, for example, the narrator takes a
childlike
view of the milk cow's motives and behavior. This move
unobtrusively but
decisively identifies the reader with Sylvia's point of view,
showing why
she values the cow's companionship and what she gains from it.
The narrative
rhetoric gradually becomes more obtrusive, however, beginning
with an arbitrary
tense shift, proceeding through a direct address to the
reader, and climaxing
when Sylvia meets the heron in a complex set of tense shifts
and direct
addresses.

The first arbitrary tense
shift breaks
the narrative flow on several levels, including the
grammatical level where
it catches the reader's attention. It occurs as Sylvia drives
the cow homeward.
She thinks about her old life in town, and remembers something
unpleasant:

[T]he thought of the great red-faced
boy who
used to chase and frighten her made her hurry along the path
to escape
from the shadow of the trees. Suddenly this little
woods-girl is
horror stricken to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not
a bird's
whistle, but a boy's whistle, determined, and somewhat
aggressive. Sylvia
left the cow to whatever sad fate might await her, and stepped
discreetly
aside into the bushes, but she was just too late. The enemy
had discovered
her. . . . (229)

An unpleasant memory disturbs Sylvia's quiet and
benign relations
with the cow. The shift to present tense coincides with the
reappearance
of that threat in the present, forcing her actually to abandon
her friend.
This move to present tense signals disruptions in the narrative:
in time,
mood, and plot development. Except for time, these disruptions
belong to
a traditional plot in that they introduce conflict. If we assume
that the
shift is a deliberate rhetorical choice rather than a lapse
revealing Jewett's
lack of expertise or control, how can we explain it? What
positive effects
may be gained from this shift?

Clearly the tense shift is
not necessary
to introduce conflict. And as a device for heightening tension
at the moment
of introducing conflict, it seems "cheap" and clumsy. Surely
Jewett was
well aware of this. The risk seems unnecessary, unless there
is something
really important to be gained. Were this the only such anomaly
in the story,
we could not make much of an argument in its defense. But
since more such
anomalies will follow this one, we can begin here to think
about how they
work on readers.

If we take the tense shift
as thoughtfully
chosen by the narrator, then we are forced to see the narrator
as potentially
a force in the story. Wayne Booth, for one, has pointed out
that overt
attempts to control a reader's reactions tend to expose a
narration as
an artificial construct (The Rhetoric of Fiction 205).
By arbitrarily
shifting tense, Jewett's narrator becomes visible, or comes
into existence
as an artificer. The narrator reveals to the reader one of her
powers,
to change the time relations between reader and story. Were we
readers
inclined simply to surrender to the rhetorical force of using
the present
tense, we would find ourselves more consciously participating
in the enactment
of narration.

The disruption of
arbitrarily shifting
the verb tense is likely to be felt as both right and wrong
simultaneously.
Past tense narration is, after all, only a convention of
telling. It is
exceedingly difficult to read any narration while maintaining
a sense of
its pastness, for the story is realized in the "present tense"
of our acts
of reading. Jewett's shift calls attention to the "real"
condition of our
reading. Insofar as we have allowed ourselves as readers to
become intimately
involved with Sylvia's contentment in her country refuge, we
and she have
entered the same experienced time. Insofar as the shift to
present tense
is felt as right, it draws us into deeper identification with
Sylvia and,
perhaps, with the narrator. We experience the violation of the
dominant
grammatical tense at the same instant that we share Sylvia's
shock at the
violation of her rural peace. Our sharing with the character
is deepened
and is pointedly placed in the same time as her shock, the
present of our
act of reading.

There is, of course, little
reason
to grant so much rhetorical power to the placement of the word
"is" in
a position where we expected "was," unless other more weighty
parts of
the story support these ways of handling this anomaly. While
the major
justification for this reading comes in the climactic scene
with the heron,
I must delay our discussion of the key scene a little longer
in order to
examine Jewett's second major disruption of the narrative
flow. Doing so
will show how she sets up the climactic scene and will allow
an exploration
of another kind of disruption, the address to the reader.

Jewett's narrator addresses
the reader
directly early in Part II of the story. The address occupies
the position
of a transition between Sylvia's going to the tree and
beginning her climb:

"[S]he stole out of the house . . .
listening
with a sense of comfort and companionship to the drowsy
twitter of a half-awakened
bird, whose perch she had jarred in passing. Alas, if the
great wave of
human interest which flooded for the first time this dull
little life should
sweep away the satisfaction of an existence heart to heart
with nature
and the dumb life of the forest!" (235)

Like the tense shift, this exclamation seems out
of place
and unnecessary. The previous sentence, in which Sylvia jars and
disturbs
the bird, effectively conveys the danger into which she is
entering. She
has found the young bird collector very attractive, and she is
tempted
to turn away from the comparatively isolated rural life in which
she has
blossomed for a year, back toward the more masculine, urban life
that threatened
to prevent her becoming a complete self. Though this turn would
be a mistake,
the story also conveys in several ways that such a turn is
inevitable.
Eventually, Sylvia must rejoin the larger human community, but
only after
she has successfully grown into a self in the way that seems
best to suit
her--on the quiet, slow farm with her grandmother. Because the
story fairly
obviously conveys these attitudes, it is superfluous for the
narrator to
make such a statement. Yet the narrator makes the statement and
underlines
its oddness by addressing it directly to the reader.

Surely Jewett was well aware
of how
this statement would jar the tone of the narrative, calling
attention to
itself and to a growing relationship between narrator and
reader as observers
in an eternal present of the narrated events. One further sign
of Jewett's
self-consciousness is that this second major departure from
narrative distance
echoes the first one. It disturbs the narrative as Sylvia
disturbs the
bird. It comes at a moment when Sylvia is in danger, though
this time she
is less aware of her danger. Indeed her lack of awareness
seems to generate
the address. We readers and the narrator think the same
thought. This seems
to me the main rhetorical effect of the address. It is as if
the narrator
and the reader looked each other in the eye and understood our
agreement
as we watch Sylvia ignorantly moving toward an undesirable
fate. The address
produces and explicitly acknowledges a moment of sympathy
between two consciousnesses
who are concerned for Sylvia. The narrative voice, then,
claims to speak
for the reader, voicing what should be the reader's thought.
This amounts
to an assertion of communion between narrator and reader as we
contemplate
Sylvia.

I have been describing how
the two
most disturbing, early diversions from a third person, past
tense narration
might work in "A White Heron." The shift to present
tense and the
direct address could be moves toward establishing the narrator
and reader
as self-conscious co-creators of the narration. Both
intrusions could reduce
the distance in time and mental location between narrator and
reader; they
could tend to move us into the same imaginative space and
time. If we are
willing to trust the author's skill, if we give in to these
odd elements
rather than resist them as signs of narrative weakness, we may
at least
find ourselves more disposed to let go of the conventional
boundaries that
tend to divide narrator, character, and reader from each other
in realistic
narrative. A close reading of Sylvia's adventure on the pine
tree will
show what we readers have to gain if we follow through with
the disposition
Jewett may have created.

Sylvia's climb, as we have
seen, takes
place in the context of a specific danger to her well-being.
She goes to
the pine to locate the heron: "[I]f one climbed it at break of
day, could
not one see all the world, and easily discover whence the
white heron flew,
and mark the place, and find the hidden nest" (234)? Sylvia
has conceived
the notion of taking all the world at once into her
consciousness. If she
succeeds, then she will be able to give a piece of that world
to the attractive
young hunter who wandered to her home two nights before. But,
as the first
address to the reader shows, the story has so controlled our
reactions
to the hunter and to Sylvia that we readers and the narrator
want Sylvia
to resist his desire to find the white heron. To give the
heron away has
become tantamount to sweeping away the progress she has made
in discovering
herself; it will amount to giving herself away, a great error,
since she
is as vast a world as the one she will see from atop the tree,
and neither
world really can be known in an instant. Her problem, as she
climbs the
tree, is that she has not yet discovered that she will lose
herself if
she flows now with the great wave of human interest that is
flooding her
little life for the first time. Jewett emphasizes this danger
during the
climb by repeatedly describing Sylvia as birdlike: her hands
and feet like
claws, her climbing upward as in first flight, her being at
home in the
trees, her desire to fly. And images emphasizing her paleness
connect her
specifically to the heron, as do images that connect both her
and the heron
with the rising sun.

Jewett prepares the reader
for the
strangeness of Sylvia's meeting the heron with more fantasy
like that which
opens the story. However, we do not see the tree from Sylvia's
point of
view as we did the cow. Here the narrator pointedly asks us
readers to
share with her imagining of the possible thoughts and actions
of the pine:

The tree . . . must truly have been
amazed that
morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this
determined spark
of human spirit creeping and climbing from higher branch to
branch. Who
knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to
advantage this light,
weak creature on her way! The old pine must have loved his new
dependent.
More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the
sweet-voiced
thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary
gray-eyed child.
And the tree stood still and held away the winds that June
morning while
the dawn grew bright in the east. (236)

Sylvia is to the tree as her blood is to her,
"coursing the
channels of her whole frame" (235). Sylvia and the tree seem one
in consciousness
and desire, though she may not herself be aware of this oneness.
Contributing
freely to her vitality, unconscious of danger, all living things
abet Sylvia
in what could turn out to be her greatest error. Implicit in
such gifts
from nature is an assurance that unity of spirit, the "existence
heart
to heart with nature," is the more powerful force in Sylvia's
life and
that it is even now asserting itself.

The reader is more directly
exposed
to that power after Sylvia attains her pinnacle and finally
sees the "vast
and awesome world" from the endless seeming eastern sea to the
also endless,
settled westward land (238). The two paragraphs describing
Sylvia's encounter
with the heron subvert any pretence to a realistic rhetoric.

In the first paragraph, she
sees the
heron:

At last the sun came up bewilderingly
bright.
Sylvia could see the white sails of ships out at sea, and the
clouds that
were purple and rose-colored and yellow at first began to fade
away. Where
was the white heron's nest in the sea of green branches, and
was this wonderful
sight and pageant of the world the only reward for having
climbed to such
a giddy height? Now look down again, Sylvia, where the green
marsh is set
among the shining birches and dark hemlocks; there where you
saw the white
heron once before you will see him again; look! look! a white
spot of him
like a single floating feather comes up from the dead hemlock
and grows
larger, and rises, and comes close at last, and goes by the
landmark pine
with steady sweep of wing and outstretched slender neck and
crested head.
And wait! wait! do not move a foot or a finger, little girl,
do not send
an arrow of light and consciousness from your two eager eyes,
for the heron
has perched on a pine bough not far beyond yours, and cries
back to his
mate on the nest, and plumes his feathers for the day! (238).

The first four sentences of this passage reenact
the general
pattern we observed in the first two disruptions of realistic
narrative.
We move from identifying with Sylvia's consciousness in the past
tense,
through a pair of questions that are at least ambiguous in their
source,
to a present tense address from the narrator to Sylvia. If
Jewett's rhetoric
has worked as a rhetoric of communion, then at this point in the
story,
we are well prepared to accept that the voice of our readerly
sympathy
coincides with the narrative voice. When that voice asks where
the nest
is, we see Sylvia's head scanning the marsh, but because the
words are
not Sylvia's spoken thoughts, we also feel the question as the
narrator's
and as our own. The second question moves us further in this
direction,
for how could Sylvia--overwhelmed as she is by the vision of all
the world
before her, exhilarated as she is by the sensation that she is
flying out
into that world--how could she feel or express disappointment?
How could
she ask whether this vision is her only reward? The
reader and the
narrator are the ones who want more for her, though we join the
pine tree
as well, in that what we want is to complete her communion with
the world,
for her to experience as fully as possible "the satisfaction of
an existence
heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest." The
second
question belongs to us, a composite voice of narrator,
reader, and
nature. And it is this composite, communing voice that next
speaks to Sylvia.
We speak in the present tense, acknowledging that the moment of
Sylvia's
vision is eternally present and that we are in it together. In
this moment,
we take over her body, directing her movements, our thoughts
becoming her
thoughts. We tell her where to look, and she looks there. We
tell her not
to move and to withhold her consciousness; she remains still and
lets the
impressions of the moment flow in.

Only as the heron withdraws,
do we
withdraw our restraining presence from her consciousness:

The child gives a long sigh a minute
later when
a company of shouting cat-birds comes also to the tree, and
vexed by their
fluttering and lawlessness the solemn heron goes away. She
knows his secret
now, the wild, light, slender bird that floats and wavers and
goes back
like an arrow presently to his home in the green world
beneath. Then Sylvia,
well satisfied, makes her perilous way down again, . . . (238)

We leave her well satisfied, knowing fully the
satisfaction
of communion with nature, which has also been communion with us.
Having
helped her restrain the arrow of her consciousness, we have also
helped
the heron to become the arrow of her consciousness as it
returns
to its home in the green world, which is, on a metaphorical
level, the
current best home for her growing spirit. We have completed the
identification
that images and comparisons have been asserting between the
brave, pale,
light, slender girl and the wild, white, light, arrow-like bird.

Jewett then uses a
fragmentary sentence
to introduce a threat to Sylvia's achieved unity: "Wondering
over and over
again what the stranger would say to her, and what he would
think when
she told him how to find his way straight to the heron's nest"
(238). This
slight grammatical jar returns us to the past tense. We see
the worried
grandmother and the hunter, who is anxious to compel Sylvia to
tell the
secret he believes she has discovered. However, as soon as we
turn to Sylvia's
consciousness, we return to the present tense:

Here she comes now,
paler
than ever . . . . The grandmother and the
sportsman stand in
the door together and question her. . . . But Sylvia does not speak
after all
. . . . No, she must keep silence!
What is
it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been
nine years
growing, and now, when the great world for the first time puts
out a hand
to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird's sake? The murmur
of the pine's
green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white
heron came flying
through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the
morning together,
and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron's secret
and give its
life away. (239)

As the heron's cry back to its mate might suggest,
there
are, in fact, two great worlds. When Sylvia stands atop the
pine, she can
see them both: the world of settled humanity and the world of
the dumb
creatures of forest and sea. Given her tendency to quiet
introspection,
the latter world is the right one for her to grow up in, though
she cannot
avoid the former if she is finally to be happy. Most of Jewett's
other
works of fiction repeatedly emphasize the importance of human
communion
to human happiness. Sylvia needs first to discover herself apart
from the
kind of society represented by whistling boys, collecting
hunters, and
noisy cat-birds. This is not the right time to take the
proffered hand
of the great world that is imaged as a "great wave of human
interest."

The great world that Sylvia
chooses
by identification with its silence is the world that makes her
dumb. In
images, it consists of all that she has seen on her trip to
find the heron.
But rhetorically, it consists of the narrator and the reader
in concert
with a sort of consciousness in nature. We have become
nature's voice in
the story. We have spoken inside Sylvia, controlling her body
and her consciousness,
and finally enforcing her silence. We have been the self that
she is in
the process of discovering, and in performing this function at
the behest
of Jewett's unusual rhetoric, we have communed with Sylvia,
with the natural
scenes she experiences, and with all who have ever or will
ever read this
story.

"A White Heron" is a great
story in
part because Jewett found a rhetoric that could overcome the
pretenses
of separation between narrator, reader, and character that are
characteristic
of realistic fiction. Like the great American
transcendentalists, Thoreau
in Walden and Whitman in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,"
she sought and
found means of using language to stimulate something like
visionary experience
in the reader.

I think we can now see that
the last
paragraph is consistent with the rhetoric of the whole story.
It is probably
wrong to say that this paragraph rips and tears at the rest of
the story,
though it may indeed do to the masculine plot what Sylvia's
silence did
to the hunter's plans for the white heron. Sylvia's silence,
as we have
seen, is not hers alone, but is rather of a piece with the
dumb life of
the forest. That silence arises out of a communion we readers
have experienced
and is the means by which we acknowledge and treasure that
communion. Our
silence affirms the irreducible value and mystery of
individual lives.
Though one may try to take, possess, or collect such lives,
one suffers
under an illusion as long as one believes anything substantial
is gained
by the effort. This is the hunter's illusion, and it is the
major sign
of his incompletion. This incompletion is signaled both times
he seems
most threatening to Sylvia's growth, in the fragmentary
sentence that announces
his whistle (229) and in the second fragmentary sentence when
Sylvia anticipates
telling him the heron's secret (238). When Sylvia gives him
silence in
response to his desire, she gives him the greatest gift she
has for him,
the same gift she has just received. This is the gift that can
make him
whole. The power of such a gift is hinted in Mrs. Tilley's
account of how
her son changed her husband's life by daring him and running
away (232).

How is the ornithologist
fragmented?
Critics have tended to associate him with the greatest evils
of Western
Civilization: Satan, sexism, commercial exploitation, cultural
tyranny,
materialism, matricide, and mad scientists. Yet most of these
critics are
forced to recognize that Sylvia, Mrs. Tilley, and the
narrator find
the hunter a personable and attractive person. The only
serious
problem Sylvia has with him is that he kills the birds he
knows and loves
so well (233). Taken out of the traditional context that
establishes some
personal or sacramental relationship with the hunted animal,
the bird collector's
actions do indeed seem reprehensible. Jewett reveals in him a
dangerous,
aggressiveness, by associating him with the pursuing red-faced
boy, by
making him an ornithologist who kills the birds he loves most
for the purposes
of knowing and possessing them, and by having him offer
comfort and money
in exchange for Sylvia's loyalty to her animal friends. He
clearly threatens
Sylvia by tempting her to leave her hermitage before she
achieves a self.
Still, he does not lack grace: "he told her many things about
the birds
and what they knew and where they lived and what they did with
themselves"
(233). The problem with the hunter is not that he is
inherently evil; rather
he is incomplete. Were everyone always to behave as the hunter
does and
never as Sylvia learns to in her vision, we would all always
kill the things
we love, or at least frighten them away with the arrows of our
consciousness.
If he shared fully the sacramental view of the heron that
Sylvia gains,
he would give up the gun and simply walk the woods to see the
birds, valuing
imaginative over literal possession. What the hunter needs is
to be rescued
from the excesses of his culture's ideology of masculinity,
from the rigidity
of his failed quest plot. He cannot complete that plot
himself; therefore,
he sends Sylvia on his behalf after the bird. When she gives
him silence
instead of the bird, she still acts on his behalf, though he
does not yet
understand this. For to be complete, the hunter needs to learn
another
kind of possession, the kind of imaginative communion with a
living spirit
that Thoreau, in his chapter in Walden on "Higher
Laws," says led
him to give up his gun.

The story's final paragraph
seems not
to be about destruction, but rather about redemption and
healing. It completes
an opposition that the story has sustained within its rhetoric
and between
its plot and rhetoric. Realistic rhetoric and plot have moved
the story
toward Sylvia's moment of decision, when she may choose
silence or speech.
As Ammons shows, there are powerful, traditional and
conventional forces
that would tend to affirm an ending in which Sylvia chooses
human society
over nature. One of these forces is the set of cultural values
implicit
in one kind of fairy-tale of female coming of age, in which
the young woman
leaves evil, older women to place herself in the care of a
questing man,
e.g., "Snow White" and "Cinderella." However, we have seen
that Jewett's
rhetoric works consistently against such expectations and
urgently engages
us readers on the side of communion with nature. Of course
there is another
tradition, visible for example in romantic transcendentalism,
that would
tend to absolutise the choice of communion with nature as
preferable to
communion with humanity. But Jewett's rhetoric also closes off
any simplistic
version of this response. Both conventional patriarchy and
romantic pantheism
are incomplete. The former will prevent Sylvia from becoming a
person capable
of communion; the latter will cut her off from complex human
relations
so that she could eventually become like "poor" Joanna in The
Country
of the Pointed Firs, incapable of human relations. The
story has sought
to heal this division by means of visionary experience, in
which various
"characters" experience communion while contemplating nature
together.

Among the effects upon a
reader of
entering into the kind of communion Jewett offers in "A White
Heron" is
the experience of that communion. Such an experience can be
redemptive.
Readers tend to come to the story saturated with the rhetoric
of realistic
fiction, where the characters, however much we may sympathize
with them,
remain outside of and separate from ourselves. Jewett's
rhetoric undoes
such separations; it "rescues" us from loneliness and takes us
into the
human communion that writing essentially
is. Our communion continues
into the final paragraph, where we participate in further acts
of healing.

In the last paragraph,
Jewett dramatises
human incompletion and acknowledges the value of human
communion. That
Sylvia wants to belong to both great worlds points to the
incompleteness
of each. Sylvia's legitimate desire to belong to the great
world of human
interest leads her to purify the hunter in her memory. The
narrator rhetorically
underlines what Sylvia forgets by detailing the violence of
the dead and
bloodied birds the hunter produced, yet grants and even
admires the desire
in Sylvia that forgets and so forgives. It really is not
certain whether
the birds were better friends to Sylvia than their hunter
might have been.
She will have lost treasures by rejecting the path he
offered her.
For one thing, she is a lonely country girl, and to
love someone,
even uncritically as a dog does may be preferable to
loneliness.
Nevertheless, when the narrator prays to nature to bring gifts
and graces
to Sylvia, we readers are confident that nature will not cease
to offer
its gifts, just as we and Whitman are confident in the last
movement of
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" that the landscape of that poem will
continue
to give itself to the eye and to indicate what it "really" is
to all who
look with vision enhanced by Whitman's incantations.

Sylvia, in imagination,
heals and redeems
the hunter. Her silence toward him reenacts nature's silence
toward her,
and so stands as an always open offer to him of actual
redemption if he
will learn how to read her silence, how to look with her.
Sylvia has become
the focus of a visionary occasion of communion between
narrator, reader,
and nature; this occasion offers to heal the divisions
valorised by the
conventions of realistic narrative, while offering redemption
from the
ideology of exploitation that corrupts the hunter. Jewett has
created a
moment of timeless unity between narrator, character, and
reader by means
of her rhetoric of communion. In doing so, she may reform and,
thereby,
alter the meaning of the masculine quest plot at the center of
her story;
she may create an imaginative space where masculine doing and
feminine
seeing may meet in temporary transcendence of their ancient
opposition.
That space is in the composite narrative voice of this story,
where we
readers may all be united for a moment--at least in our
imaginations--with
the wholeness of being that includes both nature and human
will, both the
feminine and the masculine, both seeing and doing.

Note

This essay was first published in Colby
Quarterly
26:3 (Sept. 1990), 182-194. It is reprinted here by
permission of
the Colby Quarterly.